Peanut sauce is delicious. Peanut butter is delicious. One day, while I was a poor, single bachelor, living in a flat on my own, I had the revelation that peanut butter that is just made from peanuts - you know, the kind that separates - is basically 90% of the way to a peanut sauce.

So I took a scoop of peanut butter and put it on my spaghetti.

It didn’t work very well and it looked awful, but it was actually really tasty. The version I present to you here is slightly more work, but at least it won’t turn your noodles deliciously grey and lumpy.

This is one of my favorite no-spoons lunches that is not a peanut butter sandwich - but unlike the sandwich, it uses my Secret Weapon.

The toaster oven.

If you don’t have a toaster oven, this is probably not a stoveless meal for you, and also you should get a toaster oven. People praise pressure cookers and rice cookers and nobody talks about the miracle of the toaster oven. It’s like a real oven, except the toast setting automatically shuts off! How is that not amazing.

Technically speaking, this is one of me and my spouse’s oldest dinners together at home, aside from the specific ingredients. Which is one of the biggest draws of this particular recipe: you can swap things in for other things all over the place.

We used to use hot dogs instead of sausage, for example, because they were cheap. It works okay. If you like hotdogs.

I cannot overstate the importance of keeping around basic food staples that will keep for a million years. The kind of thing you find a bag of in the back of your cupboard and go “wow how long has this been here…? Well, it still should be good.”

White rice is that thing.

Eggs make a great breakfast food: high in protein to give you energy for a while, pre-packaged serving sizes, and also they’re delicious. The only problem with them is they need to be cooked, and some mornings (let’s be honest, if you’re like me, most mornings) cooking something new is not an option.

Fortunately for all of us, there’s an easy way to cook an egg - and it uses the microwave!

The original recipe for the egg is over at The Kitchn and is super simple, but it’s got (shudder) measurements, and is just the egg, so I’ve got my own variant here.